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Recent literature in the world-systems perspective has refocused attention on questions of ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ in historical capitalism, yet rarely critically examines the underlying assumptions regarding these zones. Drawing on a developing dataset on the world’s wealthiest individuals (the World-Magnates Database), we trace the development and expansion of sugar circuits across the Atlantic world from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries to explain how the sugar commodity chain leads us to rethink some prevailing notions of core and periphery.

The strength of weak ties is among the most important theories in the social sciences. One paradoxical element of the theory has been widely understood and valued—that weak ties connect disparate regions of social structure. Less appreciated, however, is the arguably more paradoxical implication that someone only weakly connected to another would provide value beyond that which is provided by the recipient’s (ego’s) strong ties. Once this paradoxical feature of the theory and associated empirical literatures is acknowledged, the interests of the resource provider (alter) demand consideration.

Discussion of “daddies” has exploded in popular discourse, yet there is little sociological research on age-heterogenous partnerships. This paper uses data from the 2013 Midlife in the United States survey and the 2015–2016 National Social Life, Health, and Aging Project to examine age-heterogenous partnerships at older ages (63 was the approximate average age of each sample).

Employing a cultural sociological approach, this article asks how individuals from two postsocialist societies articulate principles of justice by providing narrative accounts of other peoples’ perceived choices and social mobility trajectories after 1989.

Scholarship on discrimination consistently shows that non‐Whites are at a disadvantage in obtaining goods and services relative to Whites. To a lesser extent, recent work has asked whether or not place of residence may also affect individuals’ chances in economic markets. In this study, we use a field experiment in an online market for second‐hand goods to examine transactional opportunities for White, Black, Asian, and Latino residents of both advantaged and disadvantaged neighborhoods.

The growth machine (GM) perspective has long guided urban research. Our study provides a new extension of this perspective, focusing on local business actors’ influence on communities across the United States. We question whether GM‐oriented business actors remain widely associated with contemporary local economic development policies, and further, whether these actors influence the use of limited‐government austerity policies. Conceptually, we extend the GM framework by bringing it into dialogue with the literature on urban austerity policy.

With an export-oriented manufacturing economy dependent on consumer demand in the United States, China confronted a massive crisis of unemployment when the U.S. economy crashed in 2008. To address this crisis, the Chinese government organized an extraordinary wave of investment in physical infrastructure—employing over 20 million workers to build cities, industrial zones, transportation grids, communications networks, and other megaprojects. In just three years, China consumed 1.5 times as much cement as the United States consumed during the entire twentieth century.

This article aims to explore the relationship between income and happiness. As shown by the Easterlin paradox, the relationship between income and happiness is not simple but indeed is rather complicated. The author used finite mixtures of regression models to analyze the data from the National Survey of Social Stratification and Social Mobility conducted in Japan and implemented computer simulations based on the results of the finite mixtures of regression models to examine how changes in social values influence the relationship between income and happiness.

This article shows how research on the social structure of markets may contribute to the analysis the growing income inequality in contemporary capitalist economies. The author proposes a theoretical link between embeddedness and social stratification by discussing the role of institutions and networks in markets for the distribution of economic profits between firms. The author claims that we must understand profit and free competition as opposites, as economic theory does.

Social scientists have long been interested in how cultural and structural characteristics shape individuals’ actions. We investigate this relationship by examining how macro- and micro-level religious effects shape individuals’ reports of premarital and extramarital sex. We look at how identifying with one of the major world religions—Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, or Judaism—and living in a nation with a Muslim culture shape the likelihood of sex outside of marriage.